John Birch Society Member and Allies in Alabama Kill Local Agenda 21 Scheme

Wednesday, July 11, 2018

Written by Steve Byas

They say “you can’t fight city hall,” and it is an even bigger battle when the issue “city hall” is pushing is really just a part of a world-government scheme. Yet, in Bayou La Batre, Alabama (shown), John Birch Society (parent organization of The New American) member Jim Marshall and others recently demonstrated that patriotic citizens not only can fight city hall, they can win — if they have the educational weapons in their “arsenal,” provided by The John Birch Society.

The scheme defeated in Bayou La Batre, on the Alabama Gulf coast, was part of Agenda 21, which is a globalist attempt to impose UN environmental regulations aimed at controlling local cities and towns though the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI). It was created in 1991, and already includes hundreds of member cities and towns in the United States and around the world.

But not Bayou La Batre, Alabama, due to the efforts of Jim Marshall and his allies in the business community and city government.

Marshall became aware at church of an effort to implement the Agenda 21 in his local community — all in the name of something the council called “eco-tourism.”

The ideology of Agenda 21 was well-expressed by Maurice Strong, secretary-general of the United Nations 1992 Earth Summit: “Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle-class — involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels, appliances, home and work air conditioning, and suburban housing are not sustainable.”

The buzz words of the Agenda 21 include “sustainability,” and “Smart Growth.” At its core, behind every sustainable policy initiative is the fear of overpopulation. A UN Global Biodiversity Assessment actually states, “A reasonable estimate for an industrialized world society at the present North American material standard of living would be 1 billion. At a more frugal European standard of living, 2 to 3 billion would be possible.”

While Agenda 21 is a globalist movement, its implementation is through local ordinances, usually by policymakers who are ignorant of the ultimate goal. As property-rights advocate Tom DeWeese wrote, “On the local level, this translates into planning policy that controls energy use and the efforts to cut down on the use of cars, enforcement of the building of expensive light rail train systems and bike paths, and the installation of smart meters, etc.”

Of course, people are not going to curtail their lifestyles, unless they are either forced to do so, or they are frightened into doing so. That is the main driver behind global-warming scares or climate-change frights, which go against what unbiased observations show every day (for instance, as ice sheets have slowly receded in recent decades, we have found the remains of forests that grew during both the Medieval and Roman Warm Periods, meaning those two periods were warmer than now despite the lack of large-scale human carbon dioxide releases at those times). The scares go like this: If human activity is destroying the planet, then we need to accept more mass transit, smaller dwellings, and decreased use of air conditioning, energy, and water — and more controls and limits on our lives by unaccountable government entities.

In order to get controls established, globalists have chosen to take several routes toward the end goal, both coercive and voluntary. In order to obtain voluntary concessions, proponents of these ideas find the public-education system quite useful to first indoctrinate kids coercively, through such schemes as “Common Core.” In other words, the same basic “standards” promoting radical environmentalism and acceptance of a lower standard of living are taught in all schools in America through a Common Core curriculum. (But as is the case with Agenda 21, proponents deceitfully argue that Common Core is not a national curriculum, but locally adopted “standards.” While some of the “standards” are unobjectionable, others are designed to promote a progressive or left-wing agenda. Education thus becomes indoctrination.) This makes Agenda 21 hard to fight: There is a high level of buy-in by the masses.

But Alabama was the first state to enact a law against any city implementing Agenda 21. In other words, had the city council passed the new ordinance, it would have placed them in violation of state law. And that is one of the facts that opponents keyed in upon to defeat this ordinance.

Also, leading up to the city council meeting, Marshall distributed John Birch Society material on Agenda 21 and Tom De Weese’s booklet “Why Property Rights Matter” to opinion-makers in the community. Concern over the effort grew as people saw how the ordinance would negatively affect their lives.

One key ally whom Marshall picked up along the way was local real estate businessman Mark Estes. Both Marshall and another local businessman, Jeremy Zirlott, emphasized the essential role Estes played in defeating the proposals. Zirlott told The New American, “Without Mark [Estes], it probably would have passed.”

Marshall agreed. Zirlott added, “It was within a few days of being a done deal.” As Zirlott read the proposed zoning ordinance, he became alarmed that it all tied into Agenda 21. “It was going to put us all out of business,” he realized.

Estes became aware of a problem. Estes noted that many of its provisions would have driven down property values. Estes then took up the fight as well, passing out anti-Agenda 21 literature.

Tom DeWeese, a spokesman for The John Birch Society, came to South Alabama to speak on the dangers of Agenda 21, and the momentum against the proposal continued to grow.

One city council member, Henry Barnes, was already against the proposal. By the time of the meeting, the public had already been aroused by a town meeting against the proposal, held about one week earlier. Marshall described both that meeting and the actual city council meeting as quite rowdy.

Barnes had done research on his own about the proposed ordinance, in light of the proposals known as Agenda 21. As Tom DeWeese wrote in a 2016 article for The New American, proponents of the Agenda 21 provisions will usually argue that their proposals have nothing to do with an international scheme, protesting, “Agenda 21? Never heard of it. Just local. Just local. Just local.”

But city council member Barnes noted that the wording for Agenda 2030 (which is basically an update for Agenda 21) was practically word-for-word the same as the proposed ordinance. As DeWeese wrote, “Elected representatives are often confused. Issues and policies suddenly appear in front of them with sample, ready-made legislation.” In other words, this push is not something that is happening on its own in communities such as Bayou La Batre, Alabama, but it is a top-down effort to impose a radical environmental agenda on all communities around the world.

As can be seen, proponents of this scheme want to keep the general population in the dark about the ulterior motives of government control over the lives of citizens. This is why those such as Marshall and his Birch chapter, real estate professionals such as Estes, business leaders such as Jeremy Zirlott, and local elected officials such as Barnes, are such difference-makers — when they are armed with educational materials provided by members of The John Birch Society and other patriots.